As you may or may not have heard by now, Pearl Jam had their Lollapolooza performance censored in the webcast that AT&T was broadcasting for the stop in Chicago. Apparently during the performance of ‘Daughter’ they segued into ‘Another Brick In The Wall’, which they have been prone to do. Well, during this performance they used the lyrics “George Bush, leave this world alone” and “George Bush, find yourself another home”. But if you were listening via AT&T’s Blue Room service, you never heard these lyrics. They were censored out.

This highlights a very big concern of mine that we should all be paying attention to, and that is the shear amount of control that major corporations have over what news and messages we see and hear. AT&T apologized and said that it never was supposed to have happened, but I say that’s not good enough. It DID happen, regardless of the intent and THAT is the problem.

If you’d like to read more about it, you can follow up with this article from Reuters for more of the details. In the meantime, I encourage you to talk about this amongst your friends and blog about it on your websites. This issue needs more attention and this particular incident is just egregious enough to catch peoples interest.

SXSW or South-By-Southwest is not just any normal music festival. It’s THE music pilgrimage that artists, labels and anyone that wants to be involved in the music biz makes each and every year. It’s the one place where you can catch every buzz-worthy, buzz-unworthy and buzz-hopeful act all together in one place doing their thing. It’s a literal music smorgasbord where you can gorge on all the new music you can stand. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve talked about the Creative Commons a little bit here before and about how much we think that it’s a good idea. Well, a couple of days ago, we came across a blog that is serving up a new CC licensed song every day for a year.

The name of the project is CC:365, and just as our summary explained earlier, they are serving up a new song each day that is licensed under the Creative Commons license. For those of you who haven’t followed this, it basically allows an artist to have copyright over a song, but to grant you the listener, the right to trade it, share it and pass it along to your friends. Read the rest of this entry »